


somebody up there

by Celesma



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-24
Updated: 2014-04-24
Packaged: 2018-03-21 07:04:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3682587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celesma/pseuds/Celesma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bela still remembers when the angel came for her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	somebody up there

She still dreams about it sometimes. Hell, that is. Even after she changed her name and appearance, moved back to London – discarded every marker of that time period, the first act in a lifetime she has mentally subdivided into Before and After – she remembers the horror and the pain, the intrusion and the loss. The cold and the fear (the stories had it all wrong; hell wasn't hot, it burned like the skin tearing off your flesh in strips during a raging blizzard).

She remembers not having a voice. In hell you screamed and screamed, but you couldn't hear your own pleas for mercy, couldn't hear yourself profess the degrading lengths you’d go to if it somehow earned you just one moment's reprieve from the pain. It seemed to have been a feature of her stay that was unique to her, as she was still forced to endure the screams of others nearby as they were hacked to pieces, disemboweled.

She remembers, too, the day an angel came and gave her back her voice.

It had never told her that it was an angel. It didn't say very much at all, actually. She'd been left to rot on the rack – bored with her constant screaming, the demons sometimes wandered off to find new victims – and her one remaining eye flew open as the velvet-dark void above suddenly blasted apart into a shower of lights. She heard the words

_Dean Winchester is saved_

and there was still enough of her left to remember who Dean Winchester was and think on what a bloody lucky bastard he was. The lights continued to rocket overhead, and even in the midst of her agony she was moved by the beauty of those ineffable, formless creatures ( _angels_ , she thought, although she didn't believe in angels, and the appearance of these creatures bore no relation to the pedestrian human depictions). A single tear issued from her gaping eye wound, slid down her cheek.

Absurdly, that caught the attention of one of them.

One moment it was far above her and the next it had sprung down next to the rack, a giant of light that was so much  _bigger_  than she'd initially thought, like a distant star that had been lassoed and pulled towards the earth. Bela was too terrified even to scream. The tip of one wing – which wasn't even a wing, not really; it was more like her mind couldn't comprehend the true shape of the thing she was looking at and had thus substituted a much more conventional reality – slowly lowered to her face, stopping when it was mere inches away, like a child cautiously stretching out its hand to pet a spooked rabbit. Bela started to relax; whatever it wanted, it didn't seem to have any intention of adding to her misery.

One of the creatures, which had also stopped but made no move to join their straying brethren, spoke in a voice that left her skull ringing.

_What are you doing, Castiel? The legion is right behind us._  And then, sneeringly: _She's a sinner. Let her reap what she's sowed.  
_

_Heaven has no need of her, anyway._  Another voice.  _Would you really sacrifice more of our brothers and sisters to save an irrelevant soul?_

_The only life I am risking is my own._  It was the same voice that had announced Dean's freedom.  _Our Father does not delight in the death of the wicked. How much less would He be pleased if He knew we had abandoned an innocent?_  The wingtip came closer.  _Go, Uriel and Hester. Secure a path out of the pit. I won't be long here._

The other celestial bodies departed, leaving her alone with this commander of angels: this Castiel. Bela's heart, badly ruptured as it was, rose in her throat. It wanted to save her badly enough that it was willing to die? That was… impossible. More than that, it was  _wrong._

Turn around, she cried soundlessly as the rest of the wing descended, enfolded her in its depths, which seemed suddenly as long and wide as the oceans, and yet  _warm_ , so very warm, healing her inside and out, surrounding her with a love that spoke not to feeling but to action, an assurance that she would always be safe in its care. I'm not innocent at all. I'm rubbish. Ask anyone –

_The other one protested too,_  it said with terse amusement.  _Humans are remarkably stubborn._  And then:

_My Grace should be sufficient for you._ This it said more to itself, and she had no idea what that meant except that she had heard that expression sometimes in catechism, taught by nuns more interested in preserving the reputation of a moneyed donor than in the well-being of his daughter. Next moment she felt her body undergoing a curious transformation, a  _flattening_ , the individual components of her soul being borne up and up – or  _further up and further in_ , as the books of her short-lived childhood might have phrased it – eventually coming to orbit around a dark nucleus, what Castiel had called its Grace, pulsing like an enormous beating heart. She felt traces of the  _other one,_  of Dean Winchester, floating in the surrounding ether. In hell he had been her torturer, but here they were fellow refugees, twins in the same womb.

_I know how you have suffered, Bela,_  Castiel told her. She melted into the angel's voice, letting it wrap around her like a protective arm being drawn around a weeping infant.  _I will keep you safe. That is my promise to you._

God help her, she _believed_ it.

_Thank you,_  she said. She had a voice again; she raised it now in joyous gratitude, exulting in a bliss she had never before felt in her life. Words of gratitude had once been a foreign language to her, but now they poured out of her like water from an inexhaustible fountain.  _Thankyouthankyouthankyou…_

As Castiel began to move again – streaking away from the pursuant legion of demons like a kaleidoscopic shooting star – she allowed Grace to catch her up in its embrace, sank further into its peaceful depths; and she knew nothing more until much later, when she awoke in a hotel room with feather-like tattoos adorning her body, and the inexpressibly comforting knowledge that someone, somewhere, would be watching over her always. 


End file.
